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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/30126117">The Wizarding World Doesn't Want Me</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/bro_senpai/pseuds/bro_senpai'>bro_senpai</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Transphobia, Nonbinary, Sexual Assault, Trans, Trans women, trans men</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-16 02:33:25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Rape/Non-Con</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,997</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/30126117</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/bro_senpai/pseuds/bro_senpai</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>I must say this isn't a fanfiction. This is... an essay that turned more and more into a letter. I don't even know if I am supposed to be doing this on AO3... but I couldn't find anything explicitly against it either. The reason I am leaving it here is that I don't really have anywhere else to put it. And I wouldn't feel right with myself for not saying anything. This is something you can consider a... response to JKR's essay last year, because even though I am, as always, hopelessly late, her words did weigh heavy on my heart. Even writing this now part of me is terrified of posting this. I tried to be sensitive and it took me a very long time to get the words out, so here it is.</p><p>If you feel like I misspoke, or you felt misrepresented please let me know.</p><p>There are major trigger warnings in this essay/letter:<br/>REFERENCE TO SUICIDE<br/>DESCRIPTIONS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT<br/>TRANSPHOBIA/TERFs/JKRs ESSAY</p><p>PLEASE BE SAFE.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Wizarding World Doesn't Want Me</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Harry Potter was a large part of my formative years. My mother tried to read the first book to me when I was quite young, but couldn’t get through it. Funnily enough I, however, fell in love. I remember reading the series multiple times. More times, in fact, than I can count on both hands. At the time, I had a friend who was similarly enthralled and we often played pretend as wizards in between waiting for our Hogwarts letters. Harry Potter was the first series I ever fell in love with. It’s what made me want to write and the fanfiction community surrounding it was where I found myself spending my time reading. I consumed the movies and went to Harry Potter themed birthday parties where we spent the whole night watching them one after the other. I was in love with the world of Harry Potter. </p><p> </p><p>Now, at 24, I am forced to reconcile with the fact that Hogwarts wouldn’t have had me. I am forced to look back and rationalize my love for something that was created by someone that chooses to wield their platform and wealth against me and those like me. A power and wealth that I had a hand in giving to her. </p><p> </p><p>This transphobia is one of the most dangerous kinds, not that all transphobia isn’t inherently dangerous. However, this kind of transphobia is hidden behind concern and false kindness. It coddles you while thinly veiling an underlying current of blatant and unethical disregard for truth and transparency. I feel that JKR uses her legitimate trauma as a weapon to tear down innocents who can not be correlated to this in any meaningful way. And still, she uses her own fear and the misplaced fear of others to attack and misrepresent an already attacked and misrepresented community.</p><p> </p><p>JKR’s trauma, as stated, is real and legitimate and valid. I will not accept any arguments on that point. It takes a strong heart to stand up and speak about such things. However, it is extremely absurd to me that JKR would use that trauma to justify belittling and villainizing trans people. People who I know would have otherwise been profoundly accepting of her bringing up and speaking out about such things. I only wish she were to do so in any way that did not simultaneously attempt to misrepresent and bring into question an entire group of human beings. As I find myself writing this, I do not want to trivialize what JKR went through. I do not want to trivialize the struggles that she faced that led her to where she is now. I only wish that while she was writing her essay she would have thought not to trivialize me. </p><p> </p><p>Firstly, I would like to say that trans rights are not held on the basis that “sex is not real”. The question at hand is not “does sex exist?”, but “what is gender?” which is a profusely more complicated conversation. You will not find me arguing that sex and chromosomes do not exist. Otherwise, why would we be trans? If sex isn’t real there is no reason for me to feel uncomfortable and wrong in mine. So, I want to take this chance to write in defense of myself and my community that was wrongfully attacked and justifiably hurt by the words of someone who wrote my childhood. </p><p> </p><p>I want to take into account that JKR begins by not wanting to add “toxicity”. I do not wish to either. This is not to add toxicity to what she no doubt already experiences from many in the trans community, but merely to correct her incorrect assumptions and arguments against us. I would also like to say that despite her claim of peaceful communication, the tone in this essay reads largely as passive-aggressive and combatant in defense of herself against “trans twitter activists”. With words like “my crime of ‘liking’” or referencing her cancelations while largely down-playing the hate showed to the trans community by the people she chose to associate herself with. She continually writes in a way that paints those who were hurting from her “crime of ‘liking’” or the fact that she followed a very blatant transphobic person as the enemy while ignoring the fact that these people were watching someone they idolized and supported with time and money slowly turning against them. </p><p> </p><p>In case anyone was unaware, what she liked and the person she followed was transphobic. While Magdalen Berns was a real human being with real human feelings and that can not be erased, it’s odd to me that she refers to Berns first as ‘immensely brave’, ‘lesbian’, and ‘dying of an aggressive brain tumor’ in such an obvious way. Berns surely needs to be humanized, but not in a way that also insinuates the trans activists being hurt by her hate-filled words should be seen as people that recklessly and groundlessly attacked someone who was literally dying. Burns being brave, being a lesbian, and having a brain tumor have nothing to do with the things she said on Twitter. One of which was, and I quote: “You are fucking blackface actors. You aren’t women. You’re men who get sexual kicks from being treated like women. Fuck you and your dirty fucking perversions. Our oppression isn’t a fetish you pathetic, sick, fuck.”</p><p> </p><p>Coincidentally, this is also an accurate description of the villain in JKR’s own book, isn’t it? </p><p> </p><p>This is why people, activists or otherwise, called her out on Twitter. When you align yourself with hate, you can no longer stand behind the defense of ‘victimhood’ which is constantly portrayed in the underlying tone of her essay. “She is the victim and she is because the angry Twitter trans are out of control”. She down-plays the rhetoric of the people she supports to gain sympathy from other cis-gendered people who will take her words at face value and not investigate her claims for themselves.</p><p> </p><p>JKR is not the victim of this particular story. In fact, I see someone who I believe is largely the bully. With massive wealth and a global platform, this was never a fair fight. And when the backlash came, instead of realizing this and apologizing for spreading misrepresented ‘facts’, which can and have been disproven by others, she doubles down and writes an essay playing to the sympathies of those who already despise us and wish we did not exist.</p><p> </p><p>Burns may have been a brave, dying lesbian, but that does not absolve her from the hate she put out into the world. Similarly, JKR has obvious and real trauma, but that does not justify your prejudice against trans people. </p><p> </p><p>You go on then to explain what a TERF is and you say this: “If you didn’t already know - and why would you?” only leaning further into the fact that the people you are addressing with this essay are not transgendered people in the trans community, but other cis-gendered people who know nothing about us. TERF - or Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist - is an acronym that any trans person who has spent any time in the trans community knows. This is because TERFs attack us. They are not scared, ostracized women who are simply concerned for the youth. They are a hate group set on attacking, humiliating, and alienating trans women, coddling trans men as ‘precious girls’, and erasing my non-binary siblings. They do this similarly to how JKR, whether planned or not, attacks and humiliates trans people on a global scale with this essay.</p><p> </p><p>You seem to paint TERFs as mothers and non-feminist women who are scared for their children and their own safety while down-playing the way they act and speak about trans people. You do say that they are not even trans-exclusionary “because they accept trans men”, but even this, I feel obligated to say, is transphobic. I don’t want to be protected by feminists, because I am not a female. I will be a feminist to women - all women - but feminism does not encompass me because I am not a woman. To include trans men and exclude trans women is very telling about how she and people like this really feel about trans people. She once said in a tweet: “Call yourself whatever you like…” which sounds nice on the outside, but she doesn't seem to believe that what we call ourselves is what we are.</p><p> </p><p>Next, she goes on to say “accusations of TERF-ery” and explain all of this like playground insults as if a large amount of the trans people being hurt by TERFs aren’t young and newly transitioning trans people. She trivializes what it means to be transphobic and acts like the word is attached to anyone who is “only stating the facts about sex” or “only is concerned for the children”. TERFs commonly trivialize trans women, mock their genitals, make fun of their sexual assault stories or the way they act and look by hiding behind feminism and defense of bathroom rights. They villainize trans women as sexual predators while not seeming to realize the people they should be concerned about are actual sexual predators. </p><p> </p><p>As a trans man, I do not use public restrooms. Why? Because I’m terrified of them. I don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable, or be laughed at, or chased out. Most non-passing trans people feel similarly. Instead of thinking about this logically, she seems to be digging in her heels. She says she is “speaking up” like it's her duty or obligation as a cis-gendered person who gets information about the trans community from other cis-gendered people. They explain why trans is scary and bad to each other over the internet and pat themselves on the backs when they take away our rights. “It’s an epidemic and we have to fight,” you cry when about 1% of the population is even trans in the first place. We are not an epidemic. We are a marginalized, misunderstood group of human beings able to feel the pain of being backhanded by society. We are not some monster you can throw in your movies and books that appears to steal your womanhood or a tragic figure that is woefully seduced to change genders because of misogyny. Trans men aren’t fragile flowers that need womanly protection and trans women aren’t rapists and murderers. The type of hate she is spreading doesn't correlate with the concern she seems to have for us. She seems to paint herself as the purveyor of truth and women’s rights and the safety of little girls everywhere while crushing people who have been shunned by society, their families, and/or even those they once thought friends or lovers. She says she is standing up for herself while pushing trans people to the ground at her feet and standing on top of them. </p><p> </p><p>She tells people next that there is a 4400% increase of AFAB being referred to gender clinics, but she never gives a number to that percentage. It’s common that TERFs misrepresent numbers like this to further their own agenda. Throwing out a percentage that large seems scary, but there is no context around it. Where is that number coming from? How did you get it? How large a percentage of AFAB people is that? This is nothing but fear-mongering and she seems to be participating wholeheartedly. </p><p> </p><p>She goes on to say that in an interview Lisa Littman said that: “Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time…” This has been debunked. Littman’s study was propaganda and the parents recruited were from anti-trans websites. </p><p> </p><p>But, let me still ask this:</p><p> </p><p>Why does that scare you?</p><p> </p><p>Why do children learning more about who they are as autonomous people and figuring out where they fit in the world seem to terrify you and those who subscribe to the things you preach so much? ‘Being transgender' does not only include people who are trans men or trans women. To be trans is to be nonconforming with your gender as supposed by society. Whether that means you are a man, woman, or non-binary. Gender as a construct is something society created and going beyond that which is seen as ‘normal’ is not something to be shunned or attacked. Children and teens learning who they are and <em>being children </em>is not something you should seek to control or limit. Young people are naturally curious. It is not your job to define for them what their life should be and look like. Just because it scares you doesn’t inherently mean it’s bad or wrong. </p><p> </p><p>She says Lisa Littman was attacked and shunned similarly to Maya Forstater just because the trans activists were triggered that Littman “dared to challenge” them. Actually, it was because the study was transphobic, but also it’s because what Littmanwas saying is the type of fear-mongering: ‘trans is an epidemic that must be quelled’ rhetoric that we’ve all been attacked by over and over despite the fact it has no basis in, well, fact.</p><p> </p><p>As it turns out, the trans activists are right: you can’t make someone trans. You also can’t make someone cis-gendered, and scaring ‘concerned mothers’ into thinking their trans child is ‘faking it’ is horribly immoral and is the type of fear-mongering that can ruin lives. Real trans lives, which you claim to care about. She also seems to simply brush aside the thought that trans kids do commit suicide like it is something that does not ‘align substantially with any robust data…’ </p><p> </p><p>Trans kids do and have killed themselves. I personally attempted suicide more than once in my life. So please do not brush these stories away to appease those who now feel that it’s okay to brush aside trans feelings because ‘they aren’t actually dying over this sort of thing’. It comes off as very callous to me. As you write off trans men’s stories as ‘confused girls’, trans women as ‘sexual predators’ and seemingly erase non-binary people all together, don’t be surprised when you look around and suddenly begin to see the outcry all around you. You act shocked that these hurting people <em> you hurt </em> are angry at the nonsense you’ve spewed all over your platform.</p><p> </p><p>She says she wonders if she’d have been trans. No. You wouldn’t have been, but maybe you’d at least have been more knowledgeable about us. If you’d been born 30 years later, you may have at least not written this.</p><p> </p><p>Next, it’s that she was mentally sexless in her youth.</p><p> </p><p>What?</p><p> </p><p>I’m sorry, this is just something I don’t understand. My first memory is of my mother telling me I “couldn’t wear my shirt off like daddy”. My entire childhood is photos of a little gendered me and dresses and bows. You can’t live in this world without everyone around you shoving gender down your throat. Forgive me if I don’t wish to regale her with all the stories of my youth, she seems to have a habit of reading trans men’s stories and applying her own narrative to them. She would probably think of me as some hopeless female persuaded to the other side, away from womanhood. To me, I look back and watch myself come into who I am. Learn to grow and accept myself despite the things others assume about me. She seems to be under the delusion that trans is easier than “womanhood” or that trans is an escape or some sort of viable alternative. It’s not. That’s not what being trans is. I’m not a trans man because ‘being a woman is hard’. I’m a trans man because I’m a trans man. There doesn’t have to be some divine explanation or some ultimate reasoning so everyone can debate my gender with me until the end of time. It’s not a debate. It’s who I am. You don't have to accept it, but I don’t accept you standing on top of the money I had a hand in giving you to erase my existence and the existence of people like me because you felt you had to “speak up”. </p><p> </p><p>She says she didn’t have the realistic possibility of being a man back in the 1980s, but, if she were trans, there were possibilities. The reason she didn’t experience them is because she is not trans.</p><p> </p><p>She admits she’s been told to seek out trans people, but the ones she seemed to find are oddly not mentioned at any length. Perhaps she’d already learned what was needed from TERFs and transmedicalists? These people don’t represent the majority of the trans community. They are actually very harmful to us. </p><p> </p><p>If you don’t know what I’m talking about, transmedicalists are people who believe there are girl brains and there are boy brains and if one’s body does not match up with one’s brain dysphoria occurs and dysphoria is what makes you trans.</p><p> </p><p>This is not true. There are no girl brains and no boy brains. There is not anything concrete to substantiate this. and you don’t need dysphoria to be trans. Transmed viewpoints are often used to attack other trans people and reveal them as ‘transtrenders’ or fake trans people. The ideology is most accepted by transgender people who want so much to be accepted in cis-gendered society they are willing to step over the bodies of other trans people to do it. Transmedicalists have been known to bully trans people they deem ‘fake’ off the internet and even drive them to suicide while laughing about it. Transmed is a call to appease the patriarchy by offering the logical solution that being trans is real because it's really a mental disorder.</p><p> </p><p>I don’t think I need to explain why this is transphobic. Can you imagine if we all went around saying that being gay is a mental disorder? Well, you don’t have to, because it happened. Poor gay Dumbledore, right? </p><p> </p><p>She acts like a long rigorous process is what trans people really need. Long, invasive and hard to achieve. I guess if I thought like her, I’d think the same. After all, in her argument, there are no stakes. Trans people aren't killing themselves so a long invasive medical process wrapped in thousands of miles of red tape and stamped with a ludicrous price tag should be necessary. Because everyone has the time and money for that. </p><p> </p><p>If she says we are living through the most misogynistic time, why is she not concerned about the misogyny trans women face, or the fact that what she is saying is inherently misogynistic to trans women. She’s concerned about the porn industry so why is she not concerned about the trans women who have had to turn to sex work to pay for their transitions, especially when she <em>is </em>concerned that the process to transition should be longer and more rigorous. Why does she not seem concerned with the trans women in domestic abuse situations, or trans women who face misogyny every time they open a dating app. </p><p> </p><p>I feel obligated to tell you that trans women did get a paragraph. One paragraph is among somewhere around 40, consumed by an essay that also seems to believe trans people shouldn’t have bathroom rights.</p><p> </p><p>Trans women do not believe a ‘woman’ is a costume. If she understood anything about trans people she would know this. People don’t ‘take off their trans’ at the end of a long day. Stating it as such, or trivializing it the way she does is a gross misrepresentation by someone who claims to have consulted trans people. </p><p> </p><p>Now, I want to be very serious. I refuse to speak anything against her own truth. I won’t trivialize her trauma because I wholeheartedly know that it is real. JKR’s trauma is valid and seen and I sympathize and hurt with you. I was also sexually assaulted by someone I desperately wanted to impress but chickened out. When I said no he didn’t stop. I went to school the next week and saw that same person kissing someone else right in front of me. I felt like an object. Something to be used and tossed away. I remember everything about this so clearly, and I will never forget it. I still remember the movie that played a foot away from the bed where he violated me. Even now, I’m asexual. And despite being able to write and read about sex the feeling of someone else touching me is repulsive. I know this trauma is something I will carry with me for the rest of my life.</p><p> </p><p>The words I read from JKR struck me as the words from a traumatized victim. I don’t understand what she went through and I won’t pretend like I do. No two stories are the same and just because they deal with similar topics does not make them alike. </p><p> </p><p>I won’t, however, stand for JKR painting herself the victim of <em>this </em>story. You can’t speak out of both sides of your mouth. You can’t wish for trans women’s safety and also say they should have to deal with debt and trauma of their own from trying to prove to someone in a lab coat that they are trans. None of us should have to. JKR can’t say she respects us and then kick us out of the bathrooms. She can’t say she loves us and then side with TERFs and bigots who don’t understand what trans means. </p><p> </p><p>Trans is powerful. Trans is beautiful. Trans is real. It’s not something little girls fantasize about. It’s not ‘penis envy’ or ‘misogyny’ or ‘monstrous’. Trans people and sexual predators are not the same thing. I promise you, no sane person walks into a bathroom and whips out their genitals and trans people are not insane. JKR can not act like she advocates for us and then sides against us. I can never know the hurt and pain and humiliation exactly as she went through it, because I didn’t live through what she has. I’m not her. Similarly, she is not a trans person. I would argue that no matter how many trans stories you hear, you will never fully understand what trans is. But, we don’t need absolute understanding. We need people to recognize that we are real people with real struggles. We need you to recognize that the people who you feel attacked by feel attacked by you too. And you hold ridiculously more power. You live in the global arena and you are using your position to hurt us, who loved your stories and loved what you created and supported you. The faceless wave of people attacking you are not justified in wishing you harm, but they are justified in feeling betrayed. </p><p> </p><p>It may hurt to be called Voldemort, but Voldemort isn’t real.</p><p> </p><p>Trans people are real. Trans <em>lives </em>are real. And the hate we face for existing doesn’t end when we log off Twitter. </p><p> </p><p>Not all of us have a home to go back to, a family that loves us, hell, the world doesn’t seem to love us. And now I know the wizarding world that I spent my childhood trying to get to wouldn’t have loved me either. </p><p><br/>
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</p><p>I just want to address my trans brothers, sisters, and siblings for a second as this essay becomes more and more of a letter. I see you and I love you. I know we all have struggles and I know that the world doesn’t always act like it loves us, but we need to stand up and love each other. We need to support and uplift one another. Because we are stronger together than any of us are apart. And I know it’s disheartening to see people with big platforms and tons of viewers sending hate and misinformation towards us, but please don’t let people debate you. Don’t let people erase you with “facts”. You’re real and I see you. </p><p> </p><p>Samuel</p>
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